Liquid Silver Books, $5.50, ISBN 978-1-59578-495-7
Fantasy Erotica, 2008
Halloween Treats is a – what else? – Halloween anthology with three stories revolving around love and sex with things that go bump in the night.
Veronica Wilde starts off the festival of creepiness with It’s a Wonderful Fright. Willow Van Doren is a witch who has a crush on Drake Morgan, the new man in town. However, when another witch uses magic to thwart her planned hot date with Drake, Willow decides that it is time to stop being a nice witch. Two ghosts – don’t ask – show up to warn her that her planned spell of retaliation can produce unwanted results, but Willow is bent on showing Lucretia who the boss is. Oops, the next thing she knows, she’s the star in an alternate world where she is a dominatrix with a harem of males at her beck and call. Yes, that is supposed to be a terrible thing indeed. Hmm.
Perhaps if Willow’s “punishment” is actually severe and dire, I may understand the point of this story. Okay, so in that alternate world, magic is done via necromancy, which is not cool if you haven’t played Diablo II before on your PC. The whole story comes off like a barely-there excuse to bring together some scenes that are meant to titillate.
AJ Hampton is next with Familiar Magic. I have no idea what is going on here. Is this part of an ongoing series? The author introduces some werewolf characters perfunctorily and the next thing I know, a couple of females are fighting over the opportunity to boink the hero. Ugh, such behavior is so undignified, I tell you. This one has plenty of sex scenes, but that’s about it. The author writes as if I’m supposed to be familiar with the characters already.
Tiffany Aaron closes the anthology with Zombies Are People Too. Well, zombies were people once, that’s for sure. Apparently there is this Halloween virus that goes around changing people to zombies. Our heroine Tarsala Jones is convinced that zombies are “a waste of space” and now she is sued by the Zombies Are People Too Association for writing a article stating how she feels about those things. Tarsala is convinced that a mad scientist type of villain is actually behind the virus and she’s going to find who that person is. She is going to show Christopher LaRoi, the person serving her the papers (don’t ask me why a lawyer doesn’t do that job)… by giving him a blowjob four pages into the story. What on earth?
It would be amusing if she turns out to be a zombie and she gnaws off that thing, which would be a suitably macabre, if tasteless, conclusion to a Halloween anthology, but no. But when the guy refuses the blowjob because he doesn’t like that woman, that’s when I know this story is 100% just not believable. I could enjoy the story present here if the author hasn’t added in scenes meant to titillate me at the most bizarre spots. The heroine’s willingness to go down on a guy at the strangest of moments seems more like the antics of the leading sex doll in a pornographic story, don’t you think?
All three stories here come off like silly smutty stories shambling and stumbling like zombies when it comes to passing themselves off as erotic romance. I’m not against smutty stories, of course, it’s just that I wish the authors would have at least tried to make their smutty stories more naughty instead of comical.
